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Urs Fischer, Noisette, 2009
Mixed mediums, dimensions variable
Urs Fischer got tongues wagging last week in New York. The 38-year-old, Swiss-born New Yorker has, with the encouragement of curator Massimiliano Gioni invaded The New Museum with his provocative and spectacular sculptural notions. Fischer, for anyone who hasn't heard, is the artist who in 2007 transformed Gavin Brown's gallery into what amounted to a giant grave by having the entire gallery floor bulldozed. Visitors were invited to descend into the institution's hole at their own risk.
The much-anticipated New Museum show, 'Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty' after a pseudonym of the poet Stéphane Mallarmé (Fischer, as a part of his exploration of the notion of authorship, often "names" his work), consists of new and recent work. Essentially the whole of the museum's floor space, given over to his grand sculptural theatrics. Opening night was an event that attracted fashion and art worlders from Cindy Sherman and her old man David Byrne, to nice guy Chuck Close and the ever-present John Waters. Gallerist Gavin Brown was in the house accepting congratulations for Urs, who didn't materialize until the after-party.
We started at the top and worked our way down. The 4th floor is currently home to five of the artist's gigantic aluminum forms, which might put the viewer in mind of Rodin, Bourgeois, or Franz West and Baroque sculpture. These works, each of which seems to weigh several tons, began as small forms that the artist made by squishing clay in his hand and letting it ooze between his fingers. After being enlarged and cast in aluminum, the sculptures are further layered by being painted to look like aluminum. More like themselves. Or less, depending on how you look at it.
The initial impression of randomness and anonymity of the sculptures is upset by the actual touch of the artist's hands, the lines of which can occasionally be seen in the sculptures. Certainly the works deal with space and our place in the world, the childlike origins of each work seem far removed from the imposing final products. It's like encountering an object from our past, which instead of appearing smaller to our adult selves, has grown several times its original size.
Urs Fischer, Cupadre, 2009
Fishing line, croissant, and butterfly, dimensions variable
Speaking of space, I was struck by how much I felt like I was in Outer Space in this grouping of silvery monoliths. The sculptures are like tamed asteroids that, instead of crashing into us, compel us to move around them. Most are earthbound and reside on the gallery floor. Just one, David, the Proprietor (2008-2009) is suspended from the ceiling and dangles calmly as if in effigy of itself.
One floor below Fischer has installed an untitled cast aluminum sculpture of a more or less actual size piano, complete with its bench, in pale purple paint. The objects are in the process of transforming, and at first glance appear to be melting. But when I looked at them a second time it looked as if they were in the process of being inflated. Blowing themselves up, if you will. Such a shift in perception is precisely what the artist intends. Reality for Fischer is something not only malleable, but is begging to be played with. The artist's Last Call Lascaux (2009) another 3rd Floor artwork, is comprised of photographic wallpaper of the very gallery we're standing in, complete with trompe l'oeil ceiling lights, wall signs and sprinkler system. The mildly disorienting but clever effect is of being inside a three-dimensional photograph.
The showstopper is certainly Noisette (2009), one of Fischer's now-famous hole-in-the-wall sculptures, this time complete with a mechanical (but alarmingly realistic) tongue that protrudes at irregular intervals. (This work, along with other film selections by the artist, can be seen in action on The New Museum website.) The tongue piece is hilarious, especially when watching museum-goers try to figure out the timing and waving their hands in front of the hole to catch its salute. Part of its charm, if one can call it that, is that it thwarts our inexplicable desire to receive its artistic raspberry. (I'm told a beam of some sort requires a two-second unbroken streak in order for the tongue to come out. The gallery was often too crowded and the sculpture too "looked at" to activate. Curator Gioni made me laugh when he said of the piece "It doesn't satisfy you if you continue to bother it.") Noisette is of course, also seriously naughty. It is surprising to realize that many viewers don't quite perceive that the sculpture refers to a bathroom glory hole, that classic "meeting" place for cottaging gay men. The piece intermittently shifts from humor to more profound issues such as loneliness, compulsion, repression and self-loathing. But the surface, sideshow quality of the sculpture is so satisfying as to be worth the visit.
Urs Fischer, Untitled, 2009
Mixed mediums, dimensions variable
Urs Fischer, installation views
A half dozen or so other sculptures, constructed of everything from dust, motor oil, electromagnets and even a rotting carrot, are on display in these galleries. But arguably the most impressive piece is Service à la française (2009), its title a reference to a foodie phrase for serving everything at once, on display on the 2nd Floor gallery. Dozens of mirrored rectangular boxes on the floor have been printed with photographs of everyday objects. Among the pedestrian entities writ large are a matchbook from The Ritz hotel, a creampuff, a tape dispenser, Froot Loops cereal, a fancy shoe, a dirty sneaker, disposable cigarette lighters, and a fake foam cupcake next to the image an actual cupcake. The images screened onto the mirrored sides were produced from hundreds of high resolution photographs of each object, and different sides of the box depict various views of that object. If we look down on the top of the pear box, we see the top of the pear, and so on. Fischer considers the rectangle to be "the most neutral shape" and feels that the right angles become nearly invisible to us, our eyes burnishing out the edges to perceive the true shape of the photographed object. Here, negative space--for example, the holes in a chain or the space between the slats of a music stand--is a mirror that reflects our own image or that of the other boxes. It is entirely possible to miss the fact that everything around us is either a phallic or a vulvic symbol. Perhaps most interestingly, Fischer's monuments to banality are presented without regard to a specific scale: a step ladder and telephone booth are more or less real-life sized, while the piece of cheese and VHS tape are as big as mattresses. All possess a certain majesty and the cumulative effect is wonderfully hallucinatory.
In what is sure to be the most talked about museum show for months to come, Urs Fischer has created several alternative contemporary universes.
Doug McClemont
Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty
Through February 7, 2010
The New Museum
New York
www.newmuseum.org
All images courtesy the artist; Sadie Coles HQ, London; Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York; and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich. |
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Doug McClemont is the former Editor-in-Chief of HONCHO, Torso, Mandate, Inches and Playguy. His writing regularly appears in publications such as Publishers' Weekly, Library Journal and Screw. He has written introductory essays for several monographs on contemporary art and is currently at work on a book of short stories entitled Little Morticians.
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| Published on 04-11-2009 |
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